Escape Artists
The Lounge at the End of the Universe => Gallimaufry => Topic started by: Heradel on October 15, 2007, 06:58:36 PM
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A lot of us dream/write of a future that's fossil-fuel independent, and there's a group of college kids that have been doing that bit of dreaming. The Solar Decathlon (http://www.solardecathlon.org/) is being held on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. this week and it's a competition between 20 colleges (who had their design proposals chosen from a field of 75-80 colleges/teams of colleges) to build a livable house that entirely dependent on the sun for energy. Now, the houses are limited to 800 square feet so it doesn't make much sense for anything over two people very comfortable with each other, but for the most part the houses are beautiful bits of modern architecture integrating bits of very high (and very low) technology to make the houses human habitable. From microcapsules of paraffin in the walls and BIPV (building integrated photovoltaics) to windows designed to take advantage of a winter sun for warmth and block most of the summer sun's heat (a technique dating back at least a few hundred years), they're twenty different visions of the same future. I'm sounding like a shill for big solar, but it is really effing cool. My school's (NYIT) (http://My school's (NYIT)) one of the entrants and I've been covering it for the student paper. I've got a flickr feed (http://www.flickr.com/photos/12619145@N03/) up with some of the photos I took. Though obviously biased in favor of my future alma mater, I have to say that the team from the Technische Universitat Darmstadt (http://www.solardecathlon.de/)'s house was really impressive.
If you're in the area it'll be there until Saturday, about equidistant from the Washington Monument and the Capitol (the Smithsonian Metro stop literally drops you off in the middle of the houses, and parking's a bitch).
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I just heard about this from my girlfriend, but we didn't make it over there this weekend, and I don't know if I'll be able to. But it's such a cool idea.
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I'll just (micro)bump this by pointing out that I wrote a blog entry on this, here (http://blogs.nyit.edu/dispatches/).